July 07, 2017

John le Carré on learning German

For John le Carré, starting to learn German at school was 'love at first sound' (see his recent article in The Guardian). He puts this down to having an excellent teacher. It was exactly the same with me. I loved German at school, and still do, probably because I was lucky enough to have excellent German teachers: all men -- Mr Dautch, Mr Dean and Mr Pobjoy, who was also the headmaster. I don't know what their secret was, but I can still remember everything I was taught over 40 years ago, even though I don't remember ever being tested in any of our lessons -- we just pootled along for a couple of years, panicked for about a week, then did our O Levels or A Levels. When I went to see Brecht's Threepenny Opera last year at London's National Theatre, Mr Dean's explanation of Brecht's Verfremdungstechnik (alienation technique) came flooding back; I hadn't forgotten the German word, even though I hadn't given it a thought in decades. When I first started learning German we used an old-fashioned textbook called Aufenthalt in Deutschland. One of the earliest German words we learned was der Raubritter, robber-knight. I'd never even heard the English word before, and we all pooh-poohed the author and book. I had to eat my words a few years later -- if you've even been on a trip down the River Rhine you'll know that the word robber-knight comes up a lot in commentaries, it's actually a very useful word to know if interested in German history.

What I now like particularly about German, is how a knowledge of modern German can help with the understanding of Old English, and with the etymology of common English words. The English word forlorn, for instance, comes from the past participle of the German verb 'to lose', verloren. The German sehr means 'very'. On the surface, there's no link, but sehr is related to the English sore, and an old meaning of sore, still in use today, is 'very' or 'very much', as in the sentence 'we’re in sore need of extra funding'. Weird is related to the German verb werden, to become (I wrote a post on weird a few years ago, see here).

I've been doing my bit in recent months to spread a love of German, and help people learn the language. My book Talking the Talk German, published by BBC Active, was published last month. It's one of a series of four books (the other languages are French, Spanish and Italian) designed to help people improve their conversational skills using up-to-date vocabulary. Though I say it myself, it's a good series.